Chapter 11

CHAPTER XI

He took a resolve after this not to misinterpret her words even
when Miss Stackpole appeared to strike the personal note most
strongly. He bethought himself that persons, in her view, were
simple and homogeneous organisms, and that he, for his own part,
was too perverted a representative of the nature of man to have a
right to deal with her in strict reciprocity. He carried out his
resolve with a great deal of tact, and the young lady found in
renewed contact with him no obstacle to the exercise of her
genius for unshrinking enquiry, the general application of her
confidence. Her situation at Gardencourt therefore, appreciated
as we have seen her to be by Isabel and full of appreciation
herself of that free play of intelligence which, to her sense,
rendered Isabel's character a sister-spirit, and of the easy
venerableness of Mr. Touchett, whose noble tone, as she said, met
with her full approval--her situation at Gardencourt would have
been perfectly comfortable had she not conceived an irresistible
mistrust of the little lady for whom she had at first supposed
herself obliged to "allow" as mistress of the house. She
presently discovered, in truth, that this obligation was of the
lightest and that Mrs. Touchett cared very little how Miss
Stackpole behaved. Mrs. Touchett had defined her to Isabel as
both an adventuress and a bore--adventuresses usually giving one
more of a thrill; she had expressed some surprise at her niece's
having selected such a friend, yet had immediately added that she
knew Isabel's friends were her own affair and that she had never
undertaken to like them all or to restrict the girl to those she
liked.

"If you could see none but the people I like, my dear, you'd have
a very small society," Mrs. Touchett frankly admitted; "and I
don't think I like any man or woman well enough to recommend them
to you. When it comes to recommending it's a serious affair. I
don't like Miss Stackpole--everything about her displeases me;
she talks so much too loud and looks at one as if one wanted to
look at her--which one doesn't. I'm sure she has lived all her
life in a boarding-house, and I detest the manners and the
liberties of such places. If you ask me if I prefer my own
manners, which you doubtless think very bad, I'll tell you that I
prefer them immensely. Miss Stackpole knows I detest
boarding-house civilisation, and she detests me for detesting it,
because she thinks it the highest in the world. She'd like
Gardencourt a great deal better if it were a boarding-house. For
me, I find it almost too much of one! We shall never get on
together therefore, and there's no use trying."

Mrs. Touchett was right in guessing that Henrietta disapproved of